By activating the integrated OAI-PMH Greenstone server, a Greenstone collection can participate in the worldwide open access network by which bibliographic data is made freely available by more than a thousand OAI-PMH data providers (often called open access repositories or institutional archives).

Several other Greenstone collections are referenced the above registries (7 in ROAR, 19 in OpenDoar which does not require OAI-PMH access for listing) but these collections have either not implemented OAI-PMH, or not correctly parameterised their server, or not correctly registered their service.

In addition to providing an OAI-PMH server, Greenstone has integrated OAI-PMH harvester (in the Download tab in GLI) which permits the acquisition of data from OAI-PMH servers to enrich Greenstone collections; in addition to the access to bibliographic data as defined in the OAI-PMH protocol, this harvesting facility also enables downloading of the associated documents if they are referenced in the OAI-PMH records.

Users’ comments are invited on OAI in Greenstone, e.g. on technical issues or facility of use, on other existing operational collections unknown to us, or on plans for new OAI-PMH Greenstone services.

We are pleased to announce the availability of a third operational Greenstone OAI-PMH site:

Manioc (http://www.manioc.org) is a digital library developed by the University of Antilles-Guyana (France), specializing on the Caribbean, the Amazon, the Guyana Plateau and regions or areas of interest related to these territories. The collection contains thousands of materials : digitized texts, documents, audio, video and iconographic references to cultural, social, economic or political historical events. The base OAI-PMH url is http://www.manioc.org/gsdl/cgi-bin/oaiserver . John Rose of Greenstone Team